For years, talk of extending the Red Line to Chicago’s southern-most limits was an urban legend. Longtime African-American residents of the South Side discussed it, but nothing has happened since the public train line, which runs along the city’s north-south racial divide, began operating in 1969.

Until now.

This month, the Chicago Transit Authority took a major step toward securing federal funds for the Red Line extension when it completed a preliminary environmental impact study proposing two options for placement of the line and identifying the properties that may have to be acquired for the project.

On Nov. 1, the public will comment on the study for one of the most costly and potentially transformative public infrastructure projects in decades on the predominantly black South Side. At an estimated $2.3 billion and affecting 128,000 people, from middle-class homeowners to public housing residents, the extension could mitigate the effect of transportation policies that experts say historically have supported racial segregation and economic disenfranchisement.

The project could create more than 6,000 construction jobs and dozens of businesses at four new proposed train stations along the extended route from 95th Street to 130th Street by the time it is completed in 2026, according to the transit authority. And it promises easy access to public transportation for residents of the isolated and impoverished pockets on Chicago’s southern border.

“If the City of Chicago and the region are serious about equity, equity for all of its citizens, then the Red Line extension is the major project to bring that about,” says Lou Turner, who helped lead a grass-roots effort years ago to revive a dormant plan to extend the Red Line, the city’s busiest “L” with 79 million riders in 2015.

The Red Line was born of transportation policies that enforced the color lines between black and white neighborhoods, says Turner, who worked with the defunct Developing Communities Project, where President Barack Obama got his start as a community organizer in the 1980s.

The line ends abruptly five miles from the city’s southern limits, choking off thousands of poor black Chicagoans on the Far South Side from jobs in the city by limiting their access to steady public transportation.

When the Red Line was launched nearly 50 years ago, the story was different. The opening of the Dan Ryan Expressway in 1961 expedited white flight from the South Side, Turner said. The train stopped at 95th Street to keep blacks in their place, literally. “[It] wasn’t going to be some means for black people to follow white people out of the city,” he said.

This unofficial role of the Red Line has changed over time.

“Initially it was to protect and secure white flight,” said Turner, now a professor of African-American studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “But over the years the demographics [of the Far South Side] changed and now you have black suburbs.”

The history of the Red Line

When longtime South Siders talk about the extension of the Red Line, they share the same story. Nearly 50 years ago, they say, then-Mayor Richard J. Daley told residents of the far South Side neighborhood of Roseland that he would extend the train line past 95th Street. But he didn’t. News reports at the time say it was because of a lack of money.

In 1976, there was more talk of extending the line. Instead, transit officials prioritized the extension of what is now the Blue Line north to O’Hare International Airport.

In 2002, Turner worked for the Roseland-based Developing Communities Project, which sought to extend the Red Line. In 2004, the group helped pass a non-binding ballot referendum in favor of the extension.

Jacky Grimshaw, a former member of the city’s transit board, says money may have impeded the extension.

“When building major projects you have to get federal money, and you can only go as far as federal money will take you,” said Grimshaw, who is vice president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a public policy advocacy group.

Other new lines and expansions have occurred over the years. The Orange Line opened in 1993. The Pink Line became a separate branch from the Blue Line in 2006. (The southwest bound Blue Line diverged to Park Forest or Cicero.) And the Blue Line was extended to O’Hare in 1984.

Today, transit officials say the Red Line extension is a priority for Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration, which has already funded some improvements to the line.

“What’s important is that we are moving forward now,” said Tammy Chase, a spokesperson for the Chicago Transit Authority. “It is really important to the whole Red Line vision that the mayor and [authority president] Dorval Carter Jr. have. Now this administration is taking the project very seriously, along with a number of Red Line projects, and we are moving forward.”

A long escape route

Noni Arnold starts her day well before dawn. She operates a licensed day care for residents of Altgeld Gardens, a public housing development in Riverdale, where the Red Line extension will end at 130th Street.

She started the business because residents were having a hard time getting to work on time. Many of her clients could lose their housing if they lose their jobs.

Arnold said it takes about 40 minutes on the bus to get from Altgeld to 95th Street, the nearest rapid-transit hub. On a good day, the wait for the lone bus serving Riverdale is 15 to 20 minutes.

“The parents I do child care for, most of them don’t have cars,” said Arnold, a block representative on the Chicago Housing Authority’s Local Advisory Council. “The commute is very hectic out here.”

For residents of Riverdale, the extension has few down sides. The neighborhood has the city’s highest unemployment rate at 41 percent – five times the citywide average, according to the 2014 Census.

“In places – particularly communities of color – that are disinvested still to this day, transit is literally a lifeline to get to the grocery store,” said Anita Cozart, senior director of PolicyLink, a national economic development research institute. “They need transit to get out of their communities until reinvestment comes to those communities.”

Cozart cites Oakland, Calif., as an example of how transit improvements can aid poor communities. The city is building a nine-mile bus rapid transit line through several low-income minority communities to better connect them to jobs and grocery stores in the city’s central business district.

Like most major cities, Chicago’s transit history is shaped in part by changes in federal transportation policies. The construction of the nation’s highway system diverted spending from public transit, a main mode of mobility in black communities, to highways, Cozart said.

Poor communities of color were designated as blighted to justify razing them and replacing them with highways and expressways, she said. Meanwhile, the disinvestment in public transit, she said, left many minority communities isolated and cut off from economic development and jobs.

“That is part of the transportation system’s legacy.”

Progress could have pitfalls

Photo by Kerri Pang

Community organizer Deloris Lucas doesn’t own a car and says taking public transit anywhere from her home in the Riverdale neighborhood takes forever.

In Riverdale, faster and efficient transit is not the only thing residents seek. They also want business development along the Red Line, said Deloris Lucas, president of the Golden Gate Homeowners Association, one of four subdivisions, including Altgeld, that make up Riverdale.

“There has been no development in this area, period, and the Red Line [extension] would really spark development,” said Lucas, who wants a full-line grocery store, a pharmacy, currency exchange, a library, a dry cleaner and a community center.

Advocates, however, caution that any investment in transit must be intentional and comprehensive, especially in communities like Riverdale that are the product of generations of disinvestment.

“When you disinvest in a lot of different areas, you’ve got to reinvest in all of those areas,” said Cozart, including preserving affordable housing so people living near the extension are not priced out of the area.

While benefiting the community, he warns that the project runs the risk of “unleashing gentrification forces.”

“The Greater Roseland area has the largest stock of affordable housing in the city of Chicago,” Turner said. “The three most important things in real estate are location, location, location. You put a transportation system through there, suddenly that housing stock becomes very, very valuable [to outsiders] because of its location near accessible transportation.”

Taking land for highways historically has had a negative effect on property values and communities, says Kate Lowe, assistant professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois Chicago, but that could be the opposite with transit.

“Obviously the legacy of eminent domain for highways has been really detrimental to the black community, but there is potentially some difference with the Red Line, as the Red Line will deliver a lot more benefit for the predominantly black communities on the South Side,” Lowe said. “Highways, on the other hand, facilitated cars moving right through the neighborhoods, not doing anything for the neighborhood.”

Lowe said the extension could provide benefits like economic activity, redevelopment and access to jobs.

“It’s a little tricky because planned transit investment is associated with property increases, and property value increases can come with the risk of displacement,” she added. “Anticipation of taking [land] historically hurt communities, but that was for highways. It is unclear if it will do the same for transit.”

Giving local residents a voice is crucial

Community organizing is key to ensuring transparency and accountability, including monitoring hiring practices and the project’s progression, for the transit agency and elected officials, said Cozart, who encourages residents to develop a community benefits agreement.

With 6,000 jobs on the line, local residents should have first-hire priority, and they should be given apprenticeship opportunities in the transportation industry, where African Americans are vastly underrepresented, she said. And local entrepreneurs should have dibs on retail spaces at train stations so they can take advantage of transit-oriented development.

Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), one of three aldermen whose ward will be directly affected by the extension, says there’s no need for a community benefits agreement. He said the project has advanced because he and his colleagues pressured the Chicago Transit Authority to make it “a priority for the entire system.”

The extension also runs through the wards of aldermen Howard Brookins Jr. (21st) and Carrie Austin (34th), who chairs the city’s budget committee.

Beale, who chairs the city’s transportation committee, said CTA spent billions of dollars on other projects while the Red Line sat on the back burner.

“I think between the two of us,” Beale said, referring to Austin, “we have enough leeway that we will make sure [the transit authority] does the right thing by the community.”

]]>https://www.chicagoreporter.com/red-line-extension-aims-to-improve-transit-and-development-on-the-far-south-side/feed/4For Riverdale, Red Line extension may be path to employmenthttps://www.chicagoreporter.com/for-riverdale-red-line-extension-may-be-path-to-employment/
https://www.chicagoreporter.com/for-riverdale-red-line-extension-may-be-path-to-employment/#commentsTue, 25 Oct 2016 16:38:05 +0000http://chicagoreporter.com/?p=421547Cheryl Johnson ticks off a few scenarios for how long it might take to get from her neighborhood to a nearby assembling facility for Ford Motor Co. If she drives, it’s five minutes to the plant on South Torrence Avenue near the Calumet River. If she bikes, it’s 22 minutes. If she walks, it’s a half hour.

“But if I have to use public transportation, I’ll have to catch three buses and walk six blocks just to get to the plant,” said Johnson, who lives in Riverdale, one of Chicago’s poorest and most isolated communities – and still haunted by its industrial legacy.

Cut off from major transit lines, Riverdale is 16 miles south and east of the Loop. It’s bound by the Illinois Central Railroad on the west, the city limits on the south, the Bishop Ford Expressway on the east and 115th street on the north.

Only a few bus lines go near Riverdale — the Number 34 South Michigan being the most direct.

In the geography of opportunity – a term that seeks to capture the impact of housing segregation and sprawling development on racial and class mobility – commute time is a significant factor for residents trying to escape poverty. The longer the average travel time for an area, the harder it is for people to escape poverty.

Riverdale has the highest unemployment rate in the city at 41 percent – nearly five times the citywide average, according to 2014 statistics. Of Riverdale’s working population, 37 percent spend more than an hour commuting to work, the second-highest percentage of any neighborhood in Chicago (surpassed only by the nearby Burnside neighborhood).

A correlation exists between high unemployment and long commute times, according to a Reporter analysis of Chicago community areas.Source: U.S. Census Bureau

In this remote city pocket where President Barack Obama cut his teeth as a young organizer in the 1980s, the proposed extension of the Chicago Transit Authority’s Red Line from 95th Street to 130th Street in Riverdale could change fortunes. The $2.3 billion transit project could bring thousands of construction jobs, and when it’s constructed, train service could make it easier for residents to get to work.

This month, the CTA released its preliminary environmental impact study, a major step toward securing federal funding for the project.

“If the city moves on the Red Line extension, what a great benefit it would be for this area,” Johnson said earlier this year. “We could go all the way from the Riverdale community area all the way to Loyola, to Howard, to Rogers Park. One stop. Straight. How convenient would that be? For opportunities and accessibility to other opportunities. That’s a huge issue for this area.”

Riverdale’s changing fortunes

Riverdale’s population reached its peak population of 15,018 in 1970 after the construction of Eden Green, one of the nation’s first majority black-owned and -operated townhouse and apartment developments in 1968.

Since then, Riverdale has lost residents and jobs, and many of these homes are now vacant, according to the 2010 Census. Riverdale had the highest vacancy rate—45 percent of any Chicago community.

Today, Riverdale has a population of 7,190 residents and a median income of $14,000. Almost 70 percent of residents report living in poverty — which is defined by the federal government as below $24,000 for a family with two adults and two children.

Forty-six percent of the 201 local businesses that remain in the neighborhood are retail, food or other service companies. Manufacturing businesses make up just 6 percent of local companies and construction less than 5 percent.

Historically, Riverdale has been supported by industrial manufacturing, where products are produced and shipped to other places. Over the years, the economy has shifted to the service and technology sectors, hurting the community and others like it.

University of Chicago’s Carmelo Barbaro said access to transportation is a “critical factor” for low-income workers who are trying to adapt to a new economic landscape absent stable manufacturing jobs. It is very easy to end up in a situation where you lose your job through the course of several instances where you failed to balance your childcare needs, transportation needs and your work schedule, said Barbaro, the executive director of the Poverty Lab, a local research institute.

Attracting new companies to an area like Riverdale is difficult. Businesses locate in thriving markets, and the high poverty rate in Riverdale is a deterrent, exacerbating efforts to bring jobs the community.

File Photo by Tyler Stabile

River Bend Prairie Landfill sits across the river from Altgeld Gardens on the border between Chicago and Dolton.

Then there is the legacy of bygone industries, which have left the land contaminated. Riverdale is home to six active Superfund sites, areas where local pollution poses a health risk, according to the federal government. Any new business would likely have to spend money to clean up lead and other heavy metals in the soil.

In 1945, Chicago and the federal government built Altgeld Gardens — a housing development where Johnson’s family has lived for decades. The development rapidly transformed Riverdale into a residential area.

Altgeld, a maze of red brick homes along the nearby Little Calumet River, a forest preserve and a water treatment plant, is surrounded by many former factories, landfills, dumps and polluted rivers and creeks. The area has been plagued by a range of pollutants — lead, PCBs, DDT, DDE, DDD.

In the 1980s a young Barack Obama worked with Johnson’s mother, Hazel, on a campaign to exorcise asbestos insulation from the development. The elder Johnson helped pressure President Bill Clinton to sign an executive order in the early 1990s requiring that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency consider the impact of pollution on low-income and minority communities – a key moment in the environmental justice movement.

Cheryl Johnson has continued her mother’s legacy of fighting for equality in Riverdale. Johnson, who runs the social justice advocacy organization People for Community Recovery, looks around her neighborhood and sees people who want to work – and available land.

But, she said, it is challenging to get Chicago’s leadership to see the value in Riverdale.

“Both sides have to compromise,” she said. “Industry may have to spend more, and we might have to give something up, but damn, let’s have these conversations.”

Breaking the cycle of poverty and unemployment

“When you look at Lincoln Park, Wrigleyville and other neighborhoods, there is a quality of life that exists there that does not exist in our area,” said Andrea Reed, executive director of the Greater Roseland Chamber of Commerce in the nearby Roseland neighborhood. “People have nice stores and boutiques and coffee shops and people are getting out on the weekend to the businesses in the area. We want to be able to improve the area so that we have that, so people want to live, work and play in that area.”

Some experts envision a similar future for Riverdale. Margaret Simms, director of the Low-Income Working Families initiative at the Urban Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., said Chicago can undertake an assessment of the workforce within the area to identify what businesses would generate jobs there. That would be “part of a strategy that promotes businesses that people are qualified for,” she said.

Chicago must be “more aggressive” with its vocational training and redevelopment policies, she said, adding that too often politicians are trapped in short term thinking, looking for results within an election cycle. She said a true solution would take longer. “This is an issue for public policy. This is not easy and quick — it requires a sustained strategy over time and it may not be in sync with political strategy and leadership,” Simms said.

For Reed, creating jobs in a community goes a long way to solving other problems that plague areas like Roseland and Riverdale — problems like violence and drugs.

“When you have a job, it changes the trajectory of your life,” Reed said. “When you have your own keys to your own apartment, to your own car, it changes the perspective of your life. The more people that are in that position, it creates change. The one way we know of to do this is through economic development.”

Johnson said the Red Line could do that for Riverdale.

“Whenever there is transit, there are businesses,” she said. “We have the most developable land in the city of Chicago, so why not?”

]]>https://www.chicagoreporter.com/for-riverdale-red-line-extension-may-be-path-to-employment/feed/5Cook County plan links transportation and racial equityhttps://www.chicagoreporter.com/cook-county-plan-links-transportation-and-racial-equity/
https://www.chicagoreporter.com/cook-county-plan-links-transportation-and-racial-equity/#respondThu, 08 Sep 2016 18:37:08 +0000http://chicagoreporter.com/?p=374205After years of using revenue from a road tax to pay for criminal justice costs, including the jail, Cook County will put the money back into transportation in next year’s budget.

The decision by the Board of Commissioners last month underscores how expenses for criminal justice affect local government budgets and claim a large share of taxpayer dollars – often to the detriment of other services, according to advocates for criminal justice reform.

The jail is a significant part of the county budget at $327 million out of a total budget of $ 4.5 billion in 2016.

The spending issue also feeds into an ongoing conversation about taxation, public services and racial equity in Cook County. The commissioners’ response is a new transportation plan that emphasizes equity.

By directing revenue from the motor fuel tax to roads, the county will add $45 million to next year’s transportation budget, which officials say will focus on leveraging projects to create jobs and economic development. The plan could be especially beneficial in low-income and communities of color in southern Cook, which has a large African-American population. Those communities have some of the longest commute times because of inadequate public transportation, according to transportation studies.

“The disparities result in people of color, particularly African-Americans, not having the transit that is needed to realistically have a shot at becoming gainfully employed,” said Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, whose 7th district includes Pilsen, Little Village and Back of the Yards neighborhoods. “This is probably the greatest challenge that we face in terms of making Cook County a sustainable county that provides economic opportunities in a more equitable fashion.”

The plan, the first new county transportation plan in 70 years, will improve road maintenance, upgrade freight and public transit and identify new investment sources for transit.

Garcia calls it a blueprint for the county to add transit to “enable people from the economically disenfranchised parts of the county to be able to go where the jobs are.”

The county’s decision is in line with a state constitutional amendment that will appear on the November ballot. The amendment aims to prevent the cash-strapped state from dipping into revenues generated from motor fuel taxes, license fees and vehicle registration to fill budget holes. Illinois drivers pay the 19 cents per gallon gas tax, known as the state motor fuel tax, every time they fill up their vehicles at the pump. As more attention has been paid to crumbling roads and infrastructure there’s been a push to put the gas tax in a “lockbox,” restricting it to just transportation projects.

Illinois statute allows local governments to divert motor fuel funds to pay for other services and programs, including jails and criminal justice.

Karen Martin, assistant professor of public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said safe and reliable roads are part of public safety, especially in places like Chicago where winter weather has a big impact on the quality of roads and infrastructure. But siphoning money from services that benefit everyone to an institution that benefits no one and disproportionately affects low-income blacks and Latinos is problematic, Martin added.

“We’ve been chipping at our tax base forever,” she said. “Infrastructure unsurprisingly is often the thing that gets put on the chopping block because it is easy to say, ‘Oh we don’t need to pave that road, but we really need to keep these criminals in jail.’ You can see how infrastructure could be sacrificed for something like criminal justice.”

The bottom line, Martin said, is that the nation’s criminal justice system is bloated, too expensive and needs to be scaled back.

The decision to quit diverting the motor fuel tax was a compromise reached between Board President Toni Preckwinkle and the commissioners. In exchange, the county board approved a 1 percentage-point county sales tax increase. The county is hammering out how the money will be spent in next year’s budget.

Commissioner Richard Boykin (1st) says the transportation plan is long overdue but it could do more to support equity. Though some cash-strapped communities will benefit from the plan, Boykin says the method for distributing money for projects could be based on need.

Since taking office two years ago, he said suburban towns in the western portion of his district, which includes Oak Park, Maywood, Bellwood, Broadview and parts of the city’s West Side, haven’t received money for road work. He said Bellwood and Maywood struggle to pay for infrastructure improvements like storm drains, curbs and gutters.

“It is a very disappointing proposition that you have a whole segment of the population who’s paying gas tax but they are not getting a return on their investment. Poor people pay gas tax and we should not use poor people to subsidize wealthier districts,” Boykin said.

“My district has been getting ignored and I am the gun violence district of all of the districts in terms of where gun violence is. So my district needs to the help the most,” he said, adding that transportation projects are jobs generators.

County officials said funding for some roads tilts in favor of Northwest and South and Southwest suburbs because they have the majority of county roads. There are no county roads in the suburban portion of Boykin’s district, and the city portion contains a small number, they said.

Last year, the county provided $250,000 in transportation funding to aldermen in his district through the city’s transportation department.

As part of its long-range strategic plan, the county plans to work with municipalities with non-county roads to provide technical assistance and some matching dollars for federal funds for road projects. That represents a shift in the focus of the county’s Department of Transportation and Highways, which previously prioritized county-owned roads. Now the department looks for opportunities to invest where projects can bring new businesses, create or keep jobs, said Superintendent John Yonan.

Commissioner Deborah Sims (5th), chair of the county’s roads and bridges committee, says the funding disparity in road construction is driven by economic development. Road dollars follow development projects. South suburban economic anchors like Evergreen Plaza, Lincoln Mall, Roseland Mall and Dixie Square no longer exist, she said, and Ford City Mall is “hanging on by a shoestring.”

“I don’t doubt the fact that they are doing more economic development up north,” said Sims, whose district includes the South suburbs. “They are creating more malls and housing. The businesses are not coming south for us to even have those conversations to even build those roads. You have to be able to bring something to bring the projects.”

Garcia said the most important part of the county’s transportation plan is improving transit — getting people to jobs, spurring economic development and revitalizing communities.

“I think the challenge for us now would be to put some meat on the bones since we have a good policy document on which to build.”

Clarice Gray used the peer-to-peer car-sharing app Getaround to commute from her home on the Far South Side to her job in the suburbs of Chicago.

When Clarice Gray’s car was repossessed almost a year ago, the Roseland resident turned to social media for help.

“I was looking for a creative way to get back into a car,” said Gray who used a mix of public transit and Uber to get from her Far South Side home to school and her job as a nursing assistant in the south suburbs. The two-hour bus commute on Pace, usually a 20-minute car ride, was taking its toll on her.

Gray was searching for ride-sharing services when she came across a peer-to-peer car-sharing app called Getaround on Twitter. She signed up and by the weekend, Gray had rented wheels from a stranger.

“I didn’t even know there was a market for that,” said Gray, 30. “It is like the reverse of Uber. Instead of somebody using their car to drive you, you’re using their car to drive. I was shocked to see that other people would trust [people they don’t know] to use their vehicle.”

Car sharing (renting cars from companies on a short-term basis) and its fledgling cousin, peer-to-peer car sharing (renting cars from individuals on a short-term basis), is growing in Chicago. Called the Airbnb for cars, peer to peer allows owners to rent out their cars for as low as $5 an hour on Getaround, which insures every rental up to $1 million.

The target audience for both forms of car sharing has traditionally been young white urban professionals —mostly millennials—while low-income and communities of color, which often have limited public transportation options, haven’t been part of the market for such shared-economy services.

The Shared-Use Mobility Center wants to change that. The nonprofit center partnered with San Francisco-based Getaround to create a peer-to-peer car-sharing pilot program in several communities in Chicago, including Bronzeville, Pilsen, Bridgeport and Rogers Park. The pilot will study the impact of car-sharing usage in low and moderate- income communities, while demonstrating the need for more equitable shared mobility options—from bikes to cars – for communities and people struggling with transportation choices.

Launched six months ago, the pilot has nearly 5,000 owners and renters and 75 vehicles. The two-year initiative is funded through a $715,000 Federal Highway Administration grant. Evanston is also part of the pilot program.

Public transportation can’t do it all, experts say. Nationally, regional transit systems focus on bringing people into a city’s central business district, leaving gaps at the neighborhood level, where errands to the grocery store or attending church may require a vehicle. And as jobs increasingly locate in the suburbs, people need more transportation options.

The Shared-Use Mobility Center created a mapping tool that shows car- sharing services like Getaround, ZipCar, GM-owned Maven and Enterprise CarShare dominate along the north lakefront, downtown and the near South Side. But predominately black communities on the city’s South and West sides lack the services.

“We approached them [Getaround] because we wanted to test strategies for expanding peer-to-peer car sharing in low-income areas and in lower density areas,” the center’s executive director Sharon Feigon said. “We thought that the model, the way they have it set up, was very millennial young professional oriented.”

The pilot focuses on the communities because they could benefit the most, Feigon said. Peer-to-peer car sharing could fill gaps in public transit, provide an extra income off an asset that usually sits idle for 90 percent of the time and reduce people’s carbon footprint.

But she emphasized that the marketing of these services rarely targets communities of color or generates their buy in.

Gray, who signed up for Getaround before the pilot was launched, had to travel 15 miles to pick up the rented car at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) campus.

The inconvenience was worth it, she said. “Transportation is a very necessary part of life for me.”

Racial demographics on car sharing are limited, but survey data suggest that most participants are white, highly educated and digital native young millennials.

“We have much less understanding as to why this is the case,” said Elliot Martin of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center.

“Is it an issue of positioning? Is it an issue of outreach and education?” he asked. “We do know that there is a certain demographic profile that has taken to these systems. I think it is an open question and certainly an important policy question as to what can be done to broaden the demographic appeal of these systems.”

Since most car-sharing services begin as tech startups and are experimental in nature, the goal is getting people to use the service—not necessarily who uses it, Martin said. But greater adoption begins with removing barriers. High membership fees or a credit card requirement could be cost-prohibitive for some underserved communities, he noted.

The answer for Feigon is simple — work with neighborhood organizations in its pilot area to do outreach about the service. Adoption, she said, comes from knowing the service exist, that it is legitimate, how it works, and being comfortable with strangers taking the keys to your car.

“We want to create a program that is going to work, that is going to make sense and … build trust in the program,” she said. “We are trying to breakdown those barriers and get usage.”

Feigon’s experience operating the city’s first car-sharing program for 11 years ago shaped the pilot’s approach. In 2002, she launched IGO CarSharing while working for the Center for Neighborhood Technology. It eventually expanded to some 40 communities including Bronzeville, South Shore and Austin with a membership of 16,000 and 300 cars. IGO was sold in 2013 to Enterprise Holdings and rebranded as Enterprise CarShare.

“When we put cars in different neighborhoods, there were a lot of usage and excitement about it,” Feigon said. “It is just logical. You put cars in places where there is a need and people are going to use it.”

Photo by Max Herman

Sharon Feigon, executive director of Shared-Use Mobility, is working with Getaround, a peer-to-peer car sharing app, to test strategies for expanding car sharing in low-income and lower density areas.

Building a neighborhood market for car sharing

One of those organizations hoping for a similar effect is Centers for New Horizons. The mobility center is partnering with the Bronzeville-based social service organization to do public outreach. The agency’s CEO and executive director, Christa Hamilton, sees the program as an asset to the center’s clients, more than 200 employees and the community at large.

Clients in the agency’s workforce development program can rent cars to go on job interviews or take children in its early education programs to doctors’ appointments. Employees can earn extra cash by renting their cars while at work. And the community could exchange vehicles in designated spots in the agency’s parking lot in a safe environment.

“As a car owner, it is a lot easier to do things with a vehicle sometimes,” Hamilton said, noting that with more jobs moving out to the suburbs, a car is essential. “It wouldn’t be their [clients] main mode of transportation, but it will be that convenience they need to do certain things.”

Gray uses Getaround for the convenience. It allows her to book a car using her debit card and she doesn’t have to wait for a vehicle.

“It is more time efficient. You can rent a car at the moment that you need it,” said Gray who used the service to run errands, go grocery shopping, attend family outings and take her 6-year-old daughter to and from school. Without the overhead, including the cost of gas, insurance and parking, Gray saved up enough money to purchase her own car.

Like Gray, Robin Cottrell also had to leave her West Englewood community to make car sharing work for her. She rents her 2015 Nissan Versa mostly to college kids living in the South Loop. Cottrell pays $175 a month to park her car in a South Loop parking lot, which she says eats into her profits, which can be between $400 and $800 a month. She targets downtown because Getaround has not expanded its service into South Side communities.

“It would be really nice if I can rent the car in front of my house,” said Cottrell, who is not part of the pilot program.

Some cities, like Buffalo, New York, have shown that low-income communities can support car sharing.

Buffalo CarShare carved a niche serving the low-income, but racially mixed community of Allentown. Although not the primary intent of the service, Buffalo CarShare’s former co-founder Creighton Randall said it just happened that way. He and five other people founded the service in 2009 before it was eventually sold to ZipCar in 2015.

The city’s racial and economic demographics (38.6 percent black and 10.5 percent Hispanic) shaped its customer base. And unlike most Internet and mobile app-based car-sharing service, Randall’s operation was a brick and mortar shop. That visibility attracted a range of clients from the elderly who preferred personal interactions to those without Internet access. Half of Buffalo CarShare’s members made less than $25,000, he said.

“We built the program around folks coming into the door,” said Randall, who now works with the Shared-Use Mobility Center. “We really didn’t set out to specifically appeal to a certain income bracket or a certain race. We were trying to figure out how to make the program work for Buffalo.”

A newly formed coalition wants the Metra Electric rail line to be reinvented to better serve the low-income communities it runs through, connecting riders to jobs and spurring economic development.

Roseland is one of those communities, and it is ripe for transit-oriented development, says Andrea Reed, executive director of the Greater Roseland Chamber of Commerce. The area is dotted with vacant lots, many of them situated near the Metra Electric (ME) line.

For Reed, those opportunities are boutiques and coffee shops that will employ residents and cater to tourists visiting the Pullman National Monument Park. President Barack Obama designated portions of the Pullman community—created by its namesake founder, railroad baron George M. Pullman—as a national park in 2015.

Metra is now planning $4.6 million in station improvements along the ME line, including at the 111th Street Station and the 115th Street-Kensington station, both in Pullman.

“The advantage of bringing in tourism is bringing in revenue to the community,” said Walter Kindred, a South Chicago resident and member of the Alliance for the South East, which is part of the coalition. “If tourists come, they are going to spend money. That would inspire entrepreneurs to develop and bring in businesses people can walk to.”

The ad-hoc coalition wants Metra, the commuter rail agency, to study the cost of operating the line with more frequent trains and better fare integration with CTA and Pace buses. As Metra’s fare system is now set up, lower-income bus riders are priced out, the group says.

Ultimately, however, the coalition envisions the ME line serving as a high speed rail line from downtown Chicago to O’Hare International Airport. Former Mayor Richard M. Daley first raised the idea of high speed rail service to O’Hare in 2010, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel has revisited that idea.

“To do a full financial analysis will take a lot of dollars and a lot of time. We have to talk to our board and look at what direction we need to go in,” Metra’s director and CEO Don Orseno said when the coalition presented its proposal at last month’s board meeting.

The idea of having the ME line operate like a rapid transit line is not new. It has been floated as part of previous proposals, including the plan to have ME trains operate for Chicago Transit Authority passengers as a Gray Line. But the new coalition’s efforts mark the first time that a concerted push has been launched to move the idea from the “needs more study” shelf into an actionable plan.

In fact, the CMME wants the ME line to operate like the CTA’s L system, running every 10-15 minutes. That’s similar to how it operated more than 30 years ago: Until 1981, trains ran every 20 to 30 minutes. At that time, Illinois Central (IC) operated the line, which Metra took over in 1987.

The “bones” or infrastructure of the ME make it ideal to operate as a rapid transit system, Johnson added. Its main line is the only Metra track that is above-ground for its entire length and doesn’t share tracks with freight trains, unlike Metra’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Union Pacific lines. Those lines are owned by freight companies, which affects Metra’s timetables, Johnson says.

The ME has two at-ground branches: South Chicago and the Blue Island. The tracks were elevated because of the 1893 World’s Fair to eliminate unsafe rail crossings for fairgoers. To ferry patrons to the fair, the IC built tracks to run express trains.

Photo by Stacey Rupolo

Metra is planning to improve the 111th St. Station near Pullman National Monument.

The Metra Electric runs like a vein through mostly Black communities on the city’s South Side and south suburban communities and could serve as an economic engine for these areas, which have long suffered from disinvestment. When businesses, jobs and residents left the communities, it bolstered the arguments for service cuts due to declining ridership, Johnson noted.

Under Metra’s domain, ME ridership peaked at 12 million in 1990, but it has declined steadily since then. In 2015, annual ridership was 7.9 million for the main line. For its two branches — the South Chicago and Blue Island — ridership that year was more than 868,000 and 284,000 respectively.

Metra covered an operating deficit of $64 million in 2015, when the line generate $46 million in revenue but cost $110 million to operate.

Even so, Johnson called the line an asset that, with more frequent trains, would attract new businesses and improve transit access to jobs, especially in the growing suburban employment market.

“When there is an area of high unemployment, that’s an area that needs more transit, not less,” Johnson said. “The problem with Metra is that it is priced out of the market.”

That market is low-income bus riders. Metra, Johnson said, doesn’t allow transfers from CTA or Pace — which forces bus riders to pay a second fare to transfer to a Metra train. That “brick wall,” as Johnson calls it, penalize bus riders, especially low-wage workers. Metra, he said, should allow a transfer discount, similar to the discount offered by CTA for bus and rail riders using the Ventra card. Charging people two full fares limits who can ride Metra, Johnson noted.

“When you do that, what you’re saying is we don’t want you coming off a bus,” he said. “It is particularly important for public agencies to make additional efforts to accommodate communities that have disproportionately suffered from previous public policies. Agencies that represent the whole region cannot ignore economic and historical realities.”

The CMME has been talking to community groups along the ME line to get their support and urge them to join the coalition. The group already has about a dozen members, including the Active Transportation Alliance and the Center for Neighborhood Technology. It hopes to meet with elected South Side and south suburban officials to push its plan.

“Metra doesn’t really want to do anything [other] than what it already does. So it is going to take an enormous amount of public pressure and political will ­­­­­to get them to move,” said Linda Thisted, of the Hyde Park-based group Coalition for Equitable Community Development.

State Rep. Al Riley (38), who was a member of the now-defunct House mass transit committee, says the idea has merit, along with many others aimed at sparking more economic development in disadvantaged communities. Many south suburban towns in Riley’s district are served by the ME.

“There is not a problem that we can’t solve,” he said. “The problem is making it politically feasible and that’s where we run into problems all the time. Having collaborations, bringing it out in the open, getting a lot of groups involved, means that it may have a chance that it can come to fruition.”